than 50% of what I spent. My goal was enjoyment and not austere survival.
Airfare
Free, courtesy of AMEX gold card and Chase Continental Airlines Mastercard72
Housing
Penthouse apartment on the equivalent of New York’s Fifth Avenue in Buenos Aires, including house cleaners, personal security guards, phone, energy, and high-speed Internet: $550 U.S. per month
Enormous apartment in the trendy SoHo-like Prenzlauerberg district of Berlin, including phone and energy: $300 U.S. per month
Meals
Four- or five-star restaurant meals twice daily in Buenos Aires: $10 U.S. ($300 U.S. per month)
Berlin: $18 U.S. ($540 U.S. per month)
Entertainment
VIP table and unlimited champagne for eight people at the hottest club, Opera Bay, in Buenos Aires: $150 U.S. ($18.75 U.S. per person x four visits per month = $75 U.S. per month per person)
Cover, drinks, and dancing at the hottest clubs in West Berlin: $20 U.S. per person per night x 4 = $80 U.S. per month
Education
Two hours daily of private Spanish lessons in Buenos Aires, fives times per week: $5 U.S. per hour x 40 hours per month = $200 U.S. per month
Two hours daily of private tango lessons with two world-class professional dancers: $8.33 U.S. per hour x 40 hours per month = $333.20 U.S. per month
Four hours daily of top-tier German-language instruction in Nollendorfplatz, Berlin: $175 U.S. per month, which would have paid for itself even if I had not attended classes, as the student ID card entitled me to over 40% discounts on all transportation
Six hours per week of mixed martial arts (MMA) training at the top Berlin academy: free in exchange for tutoring in English two hours per week
Transportation
Monthly subway pass and daily cab rides to and from tango lessons in Buenos Aires: $75 U.S. per month
Monthly subway, tram, and bus pass in Berlin with student discount: $85 U.S. per month
Four-Week Total for Luxury Living
Buenos Aires: $1533.20, including round-trip airfare from JFK, with a one-month stopover in Panama. Nearly one-third of this total is from the daily one-on-one instruction from world-class teachers in Spanish and Tango.
Berlin: $1180, including round-trip airfare from JFK and a one-week stopover in London.
How do these numbers compare to your current domestic monthly expenses, including rent, car insurance, utilities, weekend expenditures, partying, public transportation, gas, memberships, subscriptions, food, and all the rest? Add it all up and you may well realize, like I did, that traveling around the world and having the time of your life can save you serious money.
Fear Factors: Overcoming Excuses
Not to Travel
Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
—FANNY BURNEY (1752–1840), English novelist
But I have a house and kids. I can’t travel!
What about health insurance? What if something happens?
Isn’t travel dangerous? What if I get kidnapped or mugged?
But I’m a woman—traveling alone would be dangerous.
Most excuses not to travel are exactly that—excuses. I’ve been there, so this isn’t a holier-than-thou sermon. I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.
I’ve since met paraplegics and the deaf, senior citizens and single mothers, home owners and the poor, all of whom have sought and found excellent life-changing reasons for extended travel instead of dwelling on the million small reasons
Most of the concerns above are addressed in the Q&A, but one in particular requires a bit of preemptive nerve calming.
It’s 10:00 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
The prime fear of all parents prior to their first international trip is somehow losing a child in the shuffle.
The good news is that if you are comfortable taking your kids to New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or London, you will have even less to worry about in the starting cities I recommend in the Q&A. There are fewer guns and violent crimes in all of them compared to most large U.S. cities. The likelihood of problems is decreased further when travel is less airport and hotel-hopping among strangers and more relocation to a second home: a mini-retirement.
But still, what if?
Jen Errico, a single mother who took her two children on a five-month world tour, had a more acute fear than most, one that often woke her at 2:00 A.M. in a cold sweat: What if something happens to me?
She wanted to prime her kids for worst-case scenario but didn’t want to scare them to death, so—like all good mothers—she made it a game: Who can best memorize the itineraries, hotel addresses, and Mom’s phone number? She had emergency contacts in each country whose numbers were loaded into the speed dial of her cell phone, which had global roaming. In the end, nothing happened. Now she’s planning to move to a ski chalet in Europe and send her kids to school in multilingual France. Success begets success.
She was most afraid in Singapore, and in retrospect, it was where she had the least reason to be worried (she took her kids to South Africa, among other places). She was scared because it was the first stop and she was unaccustomed to traveling with her kids. It was perception, not reality.
Robin Malinsky-Rummell, who spent a year traveling through South America with her husband and seven- year-old son, was warned by friends and family not to visit Argentina after their devaluation riots in 2001. She did her homework, decided that the fear was unfounded, and proceeded to have the time of her life in Patagonia. When she told locals that she was originally from New York, their eyes widened and jaws dropped: “I saw those buildings blow up on TV! I would never go to such a dangerous place!” Don’t assume that places abroad are more dangerous than your hometown. Most aren’t.
Robin is convinced, as are other NR parents, that people use children as an excuse to stay in their comfort zones. It’s an easy excuse not to do something adventurous. How to overcome the fear? Robin recommends two things:
Before embarking on a long international trip with your children for the first time, take a trial run for a few weeks.
For each stop, arrange a week of language classes that begin upon arrival and take advantage of
